A data center may be defined as a location, for example, a room that houses computer systems arranged in a number of racks. A standard rack, for example, an electronics cabinet, is defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure, 78 in. (2 meters) wide, 24 in. (0.61 meter) wide and 30 in. (0.76 meter) deep. These racks are configured to house a number of computer systems, about forty (40) systems, with future configurations of racks being designed to accommodate 200 or more systems. The computer systems typically dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during the operation of the respective components. For example, a typical computer system comprising multiple microprocessors may dissipate approximately 250 W of power. Thus, a rack containing forty (40) computer systems of this type may dissipate approximately 10 KW of power.
Sensors are typically positioned throughout the data center to detect temperature, pressure, humidity, or mass flow rates of air. In order to detect these conditions with a relatively high degree of granularity, large numbers of sensors are required to be placed throughout the data center. The sensors are typically configured to transmit detected condition information to a particular computing device. As such, extensive programming and networking is often required for other computing devices to also receive this information. Furthermore, for secure transmission of information, such programming typically includes encryption and decryption of data packets, which can impose significant overhead on the operation of the sensor platforms and severely deteriorate data transmission rates from such sensor platforms. Similarly, typical handshaking protocols used to secure data transmission between senders and receivers also impose large overhead and reduce data transmission rates. Consequently, due in large part to the relatively large numbers of sensors typically employed in data centers, such programming and handshaking are associated with relatively large expenses and substantial degradation in the performance of the sensor platforms when secure data transmission is desired to prevent unauthorized data interception for malicious purposes. In addition, known programming and networking configurations to share information in this manner is also associated with singular points of failure, such that, if one of the computing devices becomes disabled, then all of the other computing devices also fail to receive the detected condition information.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a relatively efficient and inexpensive method of securely sharing detected condition information among a number of computing devices that does not suffer from the drawbacks associated with known sharing methods as discussed earlier.